


those dizzy stargazers

by strikinglight



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Developing Friendships, Gen, Kindred Spirits, Pre-Timeskip | Academy Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Seasonal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-10
Updated: 2020-09-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:33:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26282710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: “Well, Claude,” she says, and, taking his cue, picks the cinnamon bun he brought her up in one hand. “I can’t say I know very well what it’s like in the Alliance, but I must say, you’re not at all what I expected from the son of a fine house.”“High praise from the songstress Dorothea,” he says, grinning, and bumps his half-eaten croissant against hers in something resembling a toast. “You’re not so typical yourself.”In which two odd birds discover each other.
Relationships: Dorothea Arnault & Claude von Riegan
Comments: 10
Kudos: 72





	those dizzy stargazers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [strikinglight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/gifts).



> I wrote this because I love both Claude and Dorothea dearly and am sad forever that they have no in-game interactions to substantiate my cherished headscenario that they would be good pals, and also because it's my birthday next week, and I decided I was going to give myself everything I wanted. You're welcome, me.
> 
> Thank you to dearest Ceece and Gwen for looking this over—and for knowing, as ever, exactly what flavor of mischief I'm on about at all times.
> 
> [Title.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnaBFxuXF8M)

_here we stand each in the other’s light  
and are mistakable_

_— Daniela Danz, trans. Monica Cassel, “Landscape to the Left and to the Right”_

* * *

**i. spring**

The girl wears a cap over her long hair, and the emblem of the Black Eagles pinned to her lapel. Her eyes, mirrors to Claude’s own, are green.

He’s been at Garreg Mach for just an afternoon, and while the girl is not the first person he’s spoken to, she’s certainly the first person he’s wanted to speak to, for more reasons than just the usual cursory curiosity. He’ll admit privately to some of those reasons being a little utilitarian—he needs to be in Professor Manuela Casagranda’s office by sundown, to get a crash course on his bit for the opening ceremony, which is meant to take place in the cathedral after vespers. He has no idea where Manuela’s office is beyond _somewhere in the main building, probably_ , and has not since he woke up from his nap out in the paddock and noticed the light already beginning to gather in the western sky. He’d had the good sense just to book it, and then maybe figure out somewhere along the way just where exactly he was meant to be booking it to.

The girl, by the time he stops her on the staircase, turns those green eyes on him like she already knows all that. All about where he came from. It’s the sort of Look that deserves a capital L, and honestly one Claude hasn’t been much on the receiving end of since he moved out from under his mother’s roof.

“Oh, dear! You look like you’ve run the length of a city to get here.” There’s a friendly little lilt to the words, like a song. So soft, and so studiously harmless. Claude’s already catalogued the melody for examining later. “Are you lost?”

“As a matter of fact, I am, miss.” Claude reaches up to scuff the hair at the back of his head, and grins until his cheeks protest, to make himself harmless in turn. “I wonder if you might help me out. I’ve been wandering around since this afternoon and I can’t make head or tail of these hallways.”

To his credit, he’d sort of meant to do it—get lost, that is. There’s nothing better for making yourself at home in a new place than getting lost in it. In the time between the Alliance delegation dropping him off at the monastery gate and opening his eyes to the reddening clouds, he’d seen so many curious things. It had been early, too early to justify staying cooped up in the little room he’d been assigned on the second floor, doing something sensible like getting his things in order, and so he’d wandered out to poke his nose here and there. See the stables, and the fishing pond, and more cats than he’s ever seen together at once. And that had felt like scratching the surface only.

“Of course, of course. I’ll give you my best effort, anyway.” The girl’s hand goes to his shoulder, and lands there with ease, not an ounce of self-consciousness about it. There are knife callouses on that hand. Claude catalogues these things, too. “This place is really just big enough to swallow you whole… And the hallways do all look the same, don’t they? I feel like I’ve had my head on backwards all day, myself.”

“You can say that again,” says Claude. “I don’t suppose your own wanderings have brought you by Professor Manuela Casagranda’s office, by chance? I’ve a note to bring her about an urgent matter, you see.”

He doesn’t miss the flicker of recognition in her eyes, or the pensive way she taps at her cheek with one finger and murmurs “Manuela, Manuela,” as if to say she does know, or at least has some idea—but she’s got to make a show of thinking about it first. Claude’s not in such a hurry that he can’t wait to see how it plays out.

“Ah! Well, she should be meeting the house leaders about now… so you’ll probably find her upstairs.” She gestures up the staircase, back the way she came. For all he knows she might have even come from that very place. “Straight down the central corridor, second room to the left.”

Claude likes the notion of playing the eager student well, so he repeats it exactly, gesture and all. “Down the center. Second to the left. Gotcha.”

“Bravo.” She beams, but doesn’t release his shoulder just yet. “You’ve got grass in your hair, by the way.”

“Have I? Must’ve been having too much fun settling in.” He brushes the errant blades from his hair, dipping down into a bow just the way Judith had taught him on the road that morning—a bona fide Fódlani bow, with the right hand over the heart. It startles a genuine laugh from her; for no reason at all, he thinks, _Victory._ “Thank you, miss. You’ve been a great help, backwards head and all. I’ll ask your name when I’ve got mine on straight—hang tight until then!”

She’s still laughing when he leaves her behind to take the stairs two at a time to Manuela’s office. How brightly it echoes off the walls and the vaulted ceiling, following him all the way up to the second floor, more musical than the church bells that have been tolling the hours all day. There’s power in a laugh like that. She probably already knows it for herself, this odd green-eyed girl. _Just as odd as me._

He’s not late to his appointment with Manuela after all. Just on time, by the skin of his teeth. But to hear Edelgard and Dimitri tell it—both of whom had arrived a whole five minutes early, one just on the heels of the other as if it was some kind of courtesy duel—he may as well have kept them waiting a whole century. It’s Edelgard who has no qualms about telling him so, hang the fact that the three of them are, for all intents and purposes, meeting in person today for the first time.

Before now, they’ve only existed in stories to Claude, this imperial princess and this crown prince. How interesting, so very interesting indeed, to find that on the surface at least, they’re everything he expects. What great fun it will be to pick at those expectations as the months pass, and see how long they hold, because surely there is more. There is always more, with most people; they’re more likely than not to surprise you, eventually.

Later, when the sun’s gone down and the candles have been lit and this year’s crop of students has filed two by two into the grand cathedral, Claude won’t see the girl again. Instead, he’ll hear her. She’ll be clustered off to the side with some of the other girls, standing by the organ to sing the invocation, but there will be no mistaking the voice that blooms in the silence. Every word a jewel, precisely faceted.

_Lo, the food of saints is given to the pilgrim who has striven, to the child as bread from heaven, food alone for spirit meant._

The girl will sing. In the swelling tide of a hundred voices rising to answer her, no one will notice one boy who’s only just learning the words.

*

At Dorothea’s first breakfast at Garreg Mach, the lost boy from yesterday gives her a cinnamon bun.

But no, she’s cutting corners. It’s not just any lost boy. The newly declared heir to the Leicester Alliance and the current leader of the Golden Deer house, Claude von Riegan, gives her a cinnamon bun. He tips it directly off his own plate and onto the empty one in front of her, before plopping right down into the vacant chair next to hers, as if that’s something nobles just do.

“Here,” he says pleasantly, without preamble. “For you.”

“Why, my lord,” says Dorothea, with what she already knows is a hugely over-acted gasp. Manuela would despair of her, if she was awake to watch this display. “This is far too generous a gift for one such as I. What’s the occasion?”

“To make amends for troubling you yesterday.” Claude smiles, picks up the last croissant remaining on his plate with two fingers, and takes a big bite. His mouth’s still full when he says, “You like those, right? You’ve already had two of them.”

And what is she meant to say to that? It’s true, she has. She’s been told it’s tradition for the first breakfast of the year at Garreg Mach to be an Affair—they do away with seats by house, they do away with sensible portions. Instead they lay out all the food for the morning along the counter at the front of the hall, and anyone who comes to eat can take what they like, as much as they like. There’s a lot of mingling, and a lot of talking, and a lot of good noisiness drifting out the kitchen door as Cook whips up second and third refills for the empty platters, and Dorothea loves it instantly.

The other nobles all around may hem and haw about the need to make allowances for the dining hall, the paucity of offerings on its meager menu, but to her it’s a dream. That there’s a place for everyone, and more than enough to eat—that she might eat for no other reason but the pleasure of it all, to anoint her time here. Part of her still struggles not to pinch herself.

Claude von Riegan does not need her to confirm that, just before his surprise entrance, she had indeed been about to go for a third bun. This is already the second time he’s snuck up on her in as many days.

“And you watched me have two of them, did you? You’re a charming one, Lord Riegan.” And a mystery, she does not say. Mysteries are always charming, at least in the beginning. “If you mean to steal me away from Edie so soon into the school year, you can forget about it. I may have only met her yesterday, but I know in my heart that I’m hers through and through until graduation.”

“And she’s lucky by you, I’m sure,” Claude says lightly, as he takes another bite and sets the croissant back down. “I’m not about to get in the way of that bond. I’m here because I promised you a proper introduction.” He inclines his head toward her, the cheery expression he’d sat down with settling into thoughtfulness. Oddly serious-looking, suddenly, for someone with breadcrumbs on his collar. “I’ve got my head on straight this morning, and I don’t yet know your name.”

What Claude does not say: _And you must already know mine._ That alone means he cuts a funny figure against the other nobles she’s been rubbing elbows with, cautiously, here and elsewhere. Before meeting Claude von Riegan, she might have assumed there was no such thing as a noble who didn’t bear their name before them like a banner, trumpeting it for all to hear. She had only heard his in full because Lady Rhea had read it from a scroll.

It’s not the only peculiar thing about him, either. It’s many things at once, this pervasive disjointedness that makes her curious and wary and unwary all at once. Part of her is already listing them down to look at more closely later: the soundless footsteps, the easy speech. The loose, lazy sprawl of his body in the chair. Old Duke Riegan back in the Aquatic Capital must despair of him, too.

“It’s Dorothea,” she says, turning so that she might offer him her hand to—what? To kiss? To shake? It’s up to him what he does with it, and she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t interested in finding out. “No title, I’m afraid.”

“And thank all the old gods and the new for that,” he tells her, loudly, drawing a dirty look from one of the nuns the next table over. That’s probably by design. He just laughs like he hasn’t noticed, and takes her hand. “Please, just call me Claude. I grew up in the foothills around Fódlan’s Throat before my grandfather plucked me out of the grass. I’m here because he wants to make an honest man of me, entirely against my wishes. And you?”

Claude von Riegan shakes hands firmly, but briefly, in a way that makes no demands. He holds her hand in only one of his, and releases it immediately—none of the long clasping or the slow dragging of fingertips along her skin that she’s gotten used to, for better or for worse. Dorothea decides she’ll remember this, too.

“Before I came here, I was a singer in the imperial capital.” Just this side of conspiratorial, she adds, “I’m here against the wishes of many others, probably.”

Claude nods. “A singer, huh? That explains the voice I heard last night.” When she looks at him with a wrinkled brow, he amends, “They had you singing the sequence, didn’t they?”

There’s no praise there, no waxing poetic. Just a plain truth she needs to do nothing to earn, impossible to argue with: _I heard you singing, so you must be a singer._

She wonders, briefly, if he’s the singing type. Even her keen ears wouldn’t have been able to search out his voice in the congregation, but she can imagine it, she supposes, the little dukeling von Riegan, dutifully uttering the responses. _Truth the ancient types fulfilling—goddess bound, a victim willing. Sacred lamb, its lifeblood spilling, blessings to the fathers sent…_

No, Dorothea decides. She can more easily imagine him doing anything but. Admiring the stained-glass windows, perhaps, or making faces at his housemates, joyfully inattentive. She may like that better, even.

“Well, Claude,” she says, and, taking his cue, picks the cinnamon bun he brought her up in one hand. “I can’t say I know very well what it’s like in the Alliance, but I must say, you’re not at all what I expected from the son of a fine house.”

“High praise from the songstress Dorothea,” he says, grinning, and bumps his half-eaten croissant against hers in something resembling a toast. “You’re not so typical yourself.”

* * *

**ii. summer**

The young knight who’d taken Dorothea out for dinner on the second Saturday of the Blue Sea Moon had been just her age. A bit younger, even. He’d had freckles and long gangly arms that he seemed to still be learning his way around, and the name he’d given her with his invitation had been Renfred Son-of-the-Baron-of-the-Rhodos-Coast. It hadn’t taken much more than a plate of pheasant stew and one cup of grape juice to get it out of him that he’d asked her to town on a dare.

 _I don’t mean to offend, miss,_ he had said, fidgeting his fingers together in a way that reminded her, against all odds, of little Bern—and in that moment Dorothea had found herself feeling, well. Not much of anything at all. _The boys just told me you’d go to town with anyone once, and Ser Algernon promised me two stone in gold bullion if I could prove that it was true._ A bit more fidgeting, and then he’d lowered his gaze down to the dull, water-stained tabletop, unable to look at her square. _I didn’t mean anything bad by it, I swear. I just wanted to know if you’d say yes to, well, even to someone like me._

Dorothea had sighed and drained her cup, and pushed the last of the bread across the table. She couldn’t say she hadn’t expected it, somewhat. She had known the Sir Algernon of whom he spoke—had gone on a long walk through the monastery gardens with the very man, back in the spring. He’d said he adored her, then. That you could search Fódlan shore to shore and find no fairer rose in any garden, or something. Some equally poetic thing with no weight to it at all.

 _You tell your Ser Algernon that he’d better give you your two stone and one extra besides,_ she’d said to Renfred, and stood up from the table. _You tell him that for me, you understand?_

There had been nothing more to say, after that. They’d settled their bill and made the short walk back to the monastery in silence, and she had made it a point to say goodbye to him at the gate in lieu of having him see her all the way back to her room. Do the boy a good turn, put him out of his misery—at the very least so it couldn’t be said she was ever a bad date, even at the worst of times.

He hadn’t meant anything bad by it. She’s met so many boys like that—boys that remind her of the dry baking earth at the height of summer, boys who’ll do any dance for a bit of rain. They never mean anything bad by it, and anyway she had looked their way and smiled first. 

Anyway, there’s food in her belly tonight, even if it came at a cost. The night is warm, warm enough that she feels good about shedding her jacket and letting it hang uselessly from the crook of her elbow, sleeves dangling like an afterthought. Starlight on her bare arms and not a breath of wind. It could be lovely, still, this night, if she puts a little more effort into it.

“Hey, Dorothea,” says Claude’s voice, suddenly, from somewhere above her head. “Do you know much about the stars?”

Dorothea looks up in the direction of the sound and finds him leaning down over the eaves of the greenhouse—just far enough to see her and be seen by her in turn, not so far that he’s in danger of unbalancing himself and crashing face-first into the stones below. Maybe. Hopefully. It’s hair-thin, that delicate line between pain and perception; she’s walked it herself enough to know the edge is always closer than it looks.

“What are you doing up there?” she asks him, in lieu of answering the question.

“Petra’s been teaching me to climb trees,” he says, and indeed Dorothea does remember Petra saying so at dinner once, in a voice brimming so full with delight it made her own heart soar to listen. It makes her smile even now, just remembering it.

“If you wanted trees, shouldn’t you be inside the greenhouse, instead of on top of it?”

“Let’s just say I’ve found it useful to expand that knowledge to other climbable things… like, say, the ladder round the back. Much more manageable than branches, let me tell you. But don’t tell Petra.” He winks at her, and flaps his hand in a little beckoning gesture. “Why don’t you give it a try?”

There are many reasons, of course, not to give it a try. He might be all right with risking a broken neck for a pretty view, but hers serves her better whole, thank you very much. Moreover, she’s just had dinner. Moreover, she’s wearing a skirt. Moreover—and he must know this as well as she—the greenhouse roof is no secluded meeting-place, and it’s just the right time of the evening for people wandering back to their rooms in the high towers or on the upper floors of the dormitory to chance upon a conveniently placed window and see… what? Something to talk about, for sure.

Dorothea can imagine well enough what people see when they look at her. At Claude, too, if she tilts her head just so. Those people are always already talking, so she ties her jacket sleeves around her waist, and climbs the ladder.

By the time she reaches the roof, Claude’s settled back with his hands behind his head, casual as you please.

“That big bright thing over there. Is that the Blue Sea Star?”

It sounds like such an earnest question that she nearly lets slip an earnest reply: _How can you not know?_ Dorothea has never been able to wrap her head around the great maps of the sky Lady Rhea has hanging in the library, has learned too well since childhood how to keep her head down. Why, Manuela had had to retrain her to lift it, her first year at the opera, to resist the urge to blink when the house lights shone directly into her eyes. But the Blue Sea Star is only the night sky’s main event for half the year. It only stands to reason that even someone like her would recognize it on sight.

“That’s the one. Home to the goddess herself.” She gazes up at it a moment, that biggest and best-beloved star, so distant looking at it makes her ache—and adds, without quite knowing why, “It’s not my favorite, though.”

“Is it not? Which one, then, if not the one that puts all the other stars out of a job for shining?”

“Those three stars together there, in a straight line? That’s the Belt of Indech.” Dorothea lifts her arm to point—first at the Blue Sea Star, and then lower down, a short way to the left. These fainter stars, too, she’s always known, even before Manuela taught her their names. “The only constellation I recognize, and the easiest one to find. That’s why I like it best.”

Claude must hear her traitorous voice soften, must know this is not a thing she’ll tell just anyone _._ Were he to ask why she’s chosen to tell it to him, it would be a fair question. But he doesn’t ask, and he doesn’t give her the eye for it. His gaze stays on the sky.

“The Belt of Indech,” he repeats, thoughtfully. “I never knew it by that name.”

“Is that so?” Dorothea’s eyebrows rise. There’s a question rising to her lips that in the end reframes itself: “You must have come a long way to be here, then.”

“So long it’s a real headache to think about,” says Claude, with a particular kind of reticent smile that tells her he’ll say nothing more about the matter, for now. He unfolds his arms and reaches up, framing Dorothea’s constellation with his hands, and continues. “Where I grew up, we called those stars the Three Sparrows. My mother always said that if you were lost in the mountains, you needed only to look for them in the western sky, and they’d guide you home, easy as the sparrow flies.”

If there is one thing Dorothea has learned about Claude, these past months of casual acquaintanceship and careful observation, it’s that in idle moments, he tends to look up. Always searching for stars, for clouds, for the path of the wind. Almost as though he’d seek to make a home among them, and never come back down.

Dorothea doesn’t know that she could go with him so high. She doesn’t know that anyone could. But for the moment—at least for the moment—they can sit beside each other here, and her eyes can follow his towards the light.

*

It’s not written down anywhere someone might find it, of course, but Claude’s been keeping a list of close calls he’s managed to survive. A choice sampling of items on that list: first fall from a horse at age five. First fall from a wyvern, age ten. Three assassination attempts (two attempted stabbings and a botched poisoning), ages seven, twelve, and fifteen respectively. A kidnapping, age—too little to remember on his own. He wants to say three. The only reason that one’s on the list at all is because his father had thought it would make for amusing dinner table conversation, years later.

The memories have aged with him (some of them still fresher than he’d like, if he’s being truthful), accumulating like the notches Nader used to cut into his doorpost to track how much little Khalid had grown (altogether less than he’d like, if he’s being truthful). Claude is halfway across the continent from the place they were made, now, but he can’t outrun the ways they’ve made him a soft walker, and a fast talker, and a restless sleeper, even on the other side of a locked and double-bolted door. Something to learn from—if nothing else, something to laugh at, per dear old dad’s wisdom.

The greenhouse roof isn’t a close call, in the end, but a week after he tells Dorothea about the Three Sparrows, Claude does take a fall.

Dawn is breaking, and he’s leaving the library through the window—the same way he came, and has come and gone many times before this, on nights he can’t sleep. The overgrowth of vines up the monastery’s west wall is so thick, after all, that it makes a more than sturdy ladder, and the special collections are so much more rewarding to browse by candlelight, when there’s no one around to tell him off for looking too long. It should be like clockwork, this coming and going. Claude is many things, and most days careless is not one of them. Neither is clumsy, unless he’s playing it up for laughs.

That’s just most days, though, and if there’s anything Claude’s learned from eighteen-in-three-days years on the green earth, it’s that it’s safer not to rule out a real possibility, however small. Not to assume you’ll never put a foot wrong, make a bad call. And so when he puts a foot wrong—sets his weight mistakenly against a branch that’s broken in the middle—he’s at least ready for it. He falls to the grass below with his body already curled in against the impact. The landing barely even makes a sound.

The fall is nothing fatal. As far as the things on his list are concerned, it shouldn’t even place, but the pain in his left shoulder is immediate enough that he might even wish it had just gone ahead and killed him, a little. It shoots across the collarbone and down the upper arm; when he reaches around with his other hand, sure enough, there’s the telltale bump of bone protruding from the front.

Definitely pushed out of joint, then. It’s no big deal, he’ll just make like Nader and pop it right back in, nice and easy, and then—

“What’s wrong, little dukeling? Have you hurt your shoulder?”

 _Thank the gods for Dorothea,_ he thinks, and also, _I rue the day Dorothea was ever born._ Staggering how both of these things at once can seem so true, now that falling so far’s already set his head in a spin. Claude would like to think that on his best days he’s a hard person to surprise, but this is already the second time in a night, so he’s probably got no business trying to play it off when her shadow falls across him.

Because he’s himself, he tries to play it off anyway.

“Top of the morning, Dorothea! It’s nothing, really, just some bruises—”

“It looks dislocated to me,” says Dorothea, who has the good sense not to even let him finish. She kneels down next to him, peering close, though by now she’s probably seen what she needed to see several times over.

Her hand reaches out, the barest brush of fingertips against the sleeve of his jacket. The accursed shoulder twinges, right on cue, as if to remind Claude how tender human flesh is, lest he forget.

At this point, there’s no choice but to admit it. “It sort of feels dislocated, too.”

“Hm. You’re headed up to Professor Manuela’s, then, I hope. Through the front door this time.” He doesn’t miss how slowly she says this, almost as if she’s talking to a small child. Or wants to make triply sure there’s no mistaking what she means. “I hear she’s an expert at fixing things that hurt, as long as they’re not broken hearts.”

An exit opens—narrow though it might be, Claude makes a break for it. “It’s Sunday. You know wild horses couldn’t drag Manuela from her bed before noon.”

“Your house’s healer, then. You’ve got little Marianne training in white magic, haven’t you? She looks like an early riser.”

“No, I—” The thought is mildly terrifying, but there’s no joint in his body he wouldn’t willingly dislocate rather than let her know that. “You know Marianne. She’d as soon run away from me as talk to me, and that’s on a good day. On bad days I’d be lucky to find her out and about at all.”

“I see,” Dorothea says, in a voice that makes it quite plain she does not see, not even a little. “What were you intending to do about that shoulder, then, pray tell? Pray the pain away? Just let it hang out?”

“Wiggle it back in and call it a day?”

“Oh, honestly, Claude!”

“What? Soldiers on the field do it all the time!”

“Well, yes, but does this look like a battlefield to you? Don’t answer that.” Dorothea sighs and shifts closer. “All right, all right, come here. It’s easier to do it right with help.”

Before he can protest further, she reaches for his wrist, and lifts the arm, pulling it forward with a gentleness her forceful words belie. Claude feels another twinge—and then the misaligned bone rotates, slides home.

“You’re surprisingly good at this.”

“We had no healers in the lower quarter in Enbarr,” she says, matter-of-factly, without looking up. “I had to look after myself.”

“I see,” he says. And he’s never been to Enbarr, but he finds he really does. He’s familiar enough with the kinds of places she means—places that aren’t safe, places where you can cry out in pain until your lungs give out and there’s still no guarantee anyone will come. If those are the sorts of places that make you, then it’s no wonder you get good at a lot of strange things, more than enough to draw up your own list. Setting bones must be the least of it.

Dorothea pulls at his arm again—harder this time, for good measure, and Claude needs to stifle a yelp behind the back of his free hand.

“Yowch! Gods, you might be strong enough to take a man’s arm off. And then put it back on again—twice over.”

“That’s for not getting help,” she chirps, already unclasping his cape to loop into a makeshift sling, and Claude has no recourse left but to bend his elbow obediently. She ties it up at his unhurt right shoulder, releases a sigh as she tightens the knot. “Then again, this isn’t the first foolish thing I’ve seen you do.”

“And yet you’re still so kind to me,” he says. “Despite my foolishness.”

“It’s not being kind. And there’s no despite about doing a friend a good turn when you can.”

He’s watching her face as she utters the word _friend,_ lit sideways by the growing dawn. On the outside Dorothea looks like a storybook southern rose—fair-skinned, a lively flush in the cheeks, a smile so well-rehearsed it doesn’t betray a single thorn. No scars to mar that perfect face. None that he can see, anyway.

“I grant you’re right about that—but does that make us friends, then, you and I?”

If she hesitates to answer, it’s because she must know it’s an earnest question. But it’s a heartbeat’s hesitation, nothing more. She stands like she already wants to outrun it, with her back to him, brushing grass from the hem of her skirt.

He isn’t expecting her to offer him her hand. He isn’t expecting to take it, either, until he has—and then, just like that, she’s put him right back on his feet again.

“We could be,” she tells him. “Don’t you think?”

* * *

**iii. autumn**

Embarrassingly enough, Claude is the second member of the Golden Deer house to fall during the Battle of the Eagle and Lion.

He’s got nothing to prove to anyone. Before now, everything had been going according to plan. The Golden Deer had taken the central hill, and he’d struck off on his own to make his way south, ducking into a copse of trees a stone’s throw away from where Edelgard holds the Black Eagle stronghold. The next move would have been to circle around, take out maybe a few members of the Blue Lions’ vanguard before getting Edelgard in the back.

It should have been airtight strategy, but Claude knows well enough how fast the winds can change out on the field, without warning—knows that on some rare unlucky days victory and defeat aren’t so readily decided by skill or strength. Some days you just find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time, face to face with someone who just happens to be a match for you, and that’s all.

He hears the spell warming up before it hits him, the sighing in the branches and the rustling in the overgrowth, just a little too forceful to ignore. The trouble is he doesn’t get down in time. He’s just a heartbeat too slow—one heartbeat that would spell the difference between life and death in a real battle, no question—and the gale slams into him in a flurry of leaves and loose twigs.

Then he’s off his feet. Then he’s facedown in the dirt with a mouth full of grass and all the wind knocked out of him several times over—so to speak.

“Hold,” says a voice from somewhere above his head. Claude rolls over onto his back, still spitting leaves, and looks up into Dorothea’s impish eyes. “Consider yourself incinerated, Claude von Riegan.”

“Well, look at you!” he exclaims on the very first breath that returns to him, with a wonder that’s real enough. He sits up, hands deferentially raised. “You’ve sure outschemed me this time. I yield.”

Dorothea smiles. They look at each other a long moment in the disembodied quiet under the trees. The sounds of the battle continuing beyond them barely penetrate it—so many breaths, so many lifetimes away.

At last, she tilts her head pleasantly, and says, “That lovely bow of yours, if you don’t mind.”

Claude’s not forgotten that she could well take the bow herself, and the arm besides, if she set her mind to it. He opens his hand and lets it drop onto the grass; it’s only a wooden training bow, anyway, and barely makes a sound.

“I really yield.”

“I saw you and Hilda take the hill,” Dorothea says, as she bends to help him up. “You looked like you were getting terribly bored out there, so I figured I’d do you a favor and send you off to the afterlife where you can have a nice nap.”

Her hands, covered wrist to fingertips in the magic dye that Manuela had spelled onto all their weapons that morning for purposes of scorekeeping, leave long crimson swathes across his palms. When Claude’s on his feet again, she marks his face for good measure, one handprint on each cheek. Another one for the Black Eagles.

All told, he’s none the worse for wear but for a few bruises to his pride—and those are nothing, when all is said and done. They’re already healing, and he hasn’t even left the field.

“A gracious enemy as well as a friend. What I’d do without you looking out for me, Dorothea, I’ll never know.”

“I do my best!” she sings, and flutters her arms, and the wind she took him out with blows back around to bear her up gently into the overhanging branches of a nearby elm. “Say hello to Ferdie for me!”

The afterlife is a grassy hill just off the battle lines, where the packhorses are grazing. It’s got its own fair share of excitement going by the time Claude arrives, thankfully—Ingrid of the Blue Lions is there, sharing a bag of almonds with Mercedes. Lorenz and Ferdinand, wonder of wonders, are having tea. Linhardt von Hevring’s stretched out in the grass, already asleep. Claude says a jaunty hello to them all and plops down cross-legged on the slope, looking back out at the action they’ve left behind.

Not a half hour later, Dorothea arrives, twigs in her hair and cap in hand. Her forehead and throat are marked, to Claude’s great delight, with bright yellow.

“Your Marianne,” she says with one accusatory finger pointed straight at Claude’s face, making a show of being peevish, “silenced me. And then Leonie took me out, just like that. I never stood a chance.”

“Trust those two to take revenge for me.” Claude grins, and pats the empty ground next to him. “Don’t worry, death becomes you.”

The wind is rising again as Dorothea takes her seat on the hillside, carrying the clattering of wooden swords against wooden shields, the voices of their still-living friends. How quickly a battle-cry turns to laughter, with all of them playing at war like this. It’s hard not to feel like children, on a day like this. Any moment now Rhea’s going to sound the victory bell and they’ll have to gather up their toys and come home for dinner, like good little boys and girls.

From where they sit, Claude can see Gronder Field from end to end. Hilda’s locked in single combat with Caspar, defending the hill. To the south, Dimitri’s made it across enemy lines, making for the stronghold where Edelgard stands waiting, a poleaxe nearly as long as she is tall over her shoulder.

He wonders if she remembered to blunt the blade. But of course she would have—far be it from her to forget something like that.

“That Edelgard,” says Claude, chin in hands. “Almost seems like she means to hold that fort all on her own, like she’s daring people to come and take it from her.”

“Such a princess, isn’t she?” Dorothea says. The breeze disturbs her hair, and she pulls it down over one shoulder, twisting the curls between her fingers. “So ready to die.”

The word _princess_ lands heavily at Claude’s feet, and then the word _die,_ a pair of dark stones with jagged edges. If he could, he’d pick them up, one at a time, to test their weight. Feel those edges press into the inside of his palm, where the flesh is still soft.

For a brief and dreamlike instant, the image of Gronder Field before him shifts, blurs, becomes a sea of grass in the shadow of a mountain range, every feathering blade long and golden with autumn. Claude can all but hear the horses running. If he closes his eyes, he’ll see the arrows fly. Those memories are not so far away from him that he’s forgotten that war had looked like a game then, too, from a distance and behind a lofty wall. And then the arrows had come down, and he’d seen the blood in the grass, and had never been able to unsee it.

“Indeed,” he murmurs, softly enough that it can pass for a throwaway thought, that it would have slipped past someone who wasn’t listening. Someone other than Dorothea, who’s always listening. “I’ll never understand that.”

Beside him, Dorothea’s quiet. She doesn’t say, _that’s so unlike you;_ she doesn’t ask, _understand what?_ Claude will remember what the silence says for her instead, as they sit and watch the theater of their little war unfold toward its ending, and her right hand reaches down to press palm-first against the dirt, searching for something more to hold.

*

The Battle of the Eagle and Lion goes in the end to the Black Eagle house, due in large part to Edelgard’s stubbornness—as well as to a covert assassination of Prince Dimitri by Hubert, who seems to have learned not only to climb trees but also to drop out of them, without compunction, onto the backs of unsuspecting enemies. The feast that welcomes them all back to Garreg Mach, however, is Claude’s doing. This does not surprise Dorothea, when she hears of it on the march. It’s a very Claude thing, to want to celebrate the end of a battle with food and drink and rowdy songs, regardless of the outcome.

It’s no grand affair, this victory-or-defeat feast. It’s the same food, and the same tables, but no one sits by house, and that’s enough to render the whole thing strange. People wander back and forth so easily between the benches you might almost imagine the houses were a fiction. At some point Annette procures a lute from somewhere, and leads the whole front left table in an old Faerghan song about pegasi crossing the sea. Dorothea learns that song for the first time over the night’s first cup of peach currant juice; by the third, she’s committed every word of it to memory, where it will live for as long as she does.

Now it must be past midnight, and the sky has closed like a velvet curtain over them all, and she doesn’t feel like heading off to bed yet, though the crowds have long since dispersed. There’s no one left but a few sleepless hands attending to the cleaning, too industrious or too restless to let the hall go untidied for the night—Dorothea herself, washing the last of the dishes in the kitchen, and Ignatz sweeping the floor. And then there’s Claude, wiping down the countertops and chatting easily with Ashe, their voices a wordless, shapeless hum drifting through the open door.

The bells in the cathedral are tolling the hour of one in the morning when Ignatz pokes his head into the kitchen to bid Dorothea good night, Ashe following at his heels. It must be close to half-past when she comes out and finds Claude gone, only to glimpse him outside seconds later, sitting on the steps leading down to the fishing pond and leaning back on his hands. He’s looking up at the stars again.

He doesn’t seem to get much sleep, that odd boy. It’s hard to sleep when you feel yourself so alert all the time, head always craned around the corner, inspecting the shadows. A way of life that never rests, as exciting as it is exhausting. Dorothea would know. It’s why when she makes one last sweep of the tables and finds the unfinished bottle of raspberry cordial someone had brought out and left behind, and she doesn’t think twice about swiping it and two clean cups, and heading out to join him.

“Have a nightcap with me,” she says.

“I see victory’s made you generous.” Claude watches her pour, and takes the cup she offers without hesitation.

“I’m always generous, in spirit if not in practice,” she tells him, lifting her own cup. “So, what shall we drink to?”

“You mean it’s not the honor of your house?”

“No, no, not that,” says Dorothea, with an impatient wave of the hand. “We’ve been drinking to that all night. Something else.”

Claude swirls the cup, contemplating the syrupy liquid inside as if he’s counting on it to tell him the answer. “How about our lives, then, now that they’ve been returned to us?” He chuckles, rubbing at a spot on his cheek where, if Dorothea squints a little, she might still see the ghost of a crimson stain. “And at no small cost, either. I could’ve sworn I was going to scrub my own face off trying to get that dye out.”

He’s right about that; Leonie’s padded arrow had left a blooming mark on her forehead that had kept her in the bath for twenty minutes. And there are fingerprints on the side of her neck that she already knows won’t come out.

“To our lives. May we keep hold of them better than we did today.”

Claude laughs, and they clink glasses. “I’ll definitely drink to that.”

They drink, and sit with their shoulders together against the deepening chill. Claude reaches the bottom of his cup first—and by that time it seems like whatever philosophical questions he was mulling over when he first let the night pull him out here have begun floating to the surface.

“You don’t care for this, do you? All this fighting. You could stomach today because it’s fake, like theater, but otherwise.”

Dorothea takes another long sip, feels the cordial coat the inside of her throat like the last mouthful of honey before a song. She needs something sweet to take the edge off the most difficult notes, always.

“All life is theater, isn’t it? Doing things you don’t care to do. Playing your part, however complicated the lines.”

“That makes sense,” he says—and Dorothea knows lip service, too, what it sounds like when someone’s just saying the words they’ve been assigned to say. This is not that.

“Would you care for it, if you had to do it for real?”

“What, acting?”

“Fighting.” She stifles a giggle behind her lips. “Keep up.”

“Sorry, sorry! I don’t know. Sometimes it’s a means to an end. You’re right, though; I can’t say I’d care for it.” Then, in that slippery way that only Claude can say things, he’s turned to her, and refracted the question right back. A moonbeam against a mirror, making shadows as it bends. “If it were up to you, Dorothea, what’s a part you’d actually want to play?”

It’s a funny question. Exactly the sort of question for past midnight, for soul-baring conversations with unexpected people when there’s no one else around to hear. Trust the two of them, thinks Dorothea, to wear their clichés with such grace.

“A more boring part,” she says, truthfully enough. “The pretty wife of a person of good standing, someone rich but not too important—a scholar or a merchant, or some minor lord or lady. They’ll take care of me, and we’ll live out our days in a fine house where nothing exciting ever happens, and no one has a reason to tell stories about us, ever again.”

Claude hums, thoughtful, as though he’s unlocked something. And maybe he has. “Sounds like a bit role.”

“Does that sound silly to you, Claude? That I’d use my beauty to marry money, so I can play such a tiny bit role as that?”

“Why would it be silly? You are beautiful.” He says it in the same tone as one would say that rain falls downwards, or that in less than two moons’ time the Blue Sea Star will leave the sky for the winter, and will stay away through spring—obvious, and easy. A true thing that means nothing, demands nothing. “And it’s not wrong to want to live.”

Dorothea considers this, gaze high on that single star, waning in the autumn dark. At the end of the day, he hasn’t told her anything she doesn’t already know. In all likelihood, neither has she—and what a blessing, this luxury of saying obvious things. What a gift neither of them must have asked for, before their paths ever brought them here.

“And you, sir,” she tells him, at last, with a smile that comes out just a touch too crooked for the stage, “are too clever by half.”

* * *

**iv. winter**

The Ethereal Moon comes, and Claude says to Dorothea, in front of a good quarter of the academy, “I heard something funny once about dancing the waltz.”

The winter ball is next week, and everyone’s a-twitter about this or that romantic notion such occasions encourage—the dancing, the romance, the possibility of romance presented by a certain legend about the Goddess Tower. Each little ribbon of gossip Dorothea hears is more fanciful than the last, and it makes her smile, even if she doesn’t partake as far as volunteering her own desires is concerned. Because everyone’s romantic notions need legs to stand on, she’s happy to listen, and to oversee dance practice.

If she can help her interested schoolmates find their feet, literally as well as figuratively, well, that’s always a nice thing, isn’t it? So she faces Claude from the center of the Great Hall, and asks, in a voice that carries across the tiles, “And what might that be?”

“I once heard,” Claude says, stepping forward from where he’s been leaning by the door in his usual insouciant repose, “that the true test of a good waltz is gentleness of motion. That the perfect waltz proceeds so smoothly and so delicately a candle flame won’t go out in the hand of the lead dancer.” He takes a candle illustratively from its holder and continues forward to where she stands. “For something like that, it sounds like you’d need the perfect partner.”

Such theatrics. Dorothea stifles a laugh, and inclines her head instead. “Would that be you, Claude?”

“Oh, no. It could be you, though,” Claude says, as if it is a matter of fact, and reaches out one open hand to her. “Want to find out?”

Such a ripple goes through the crowd you’d think he was proposing marriage. She can’t wait to see how this story travels, which parts of it will get so twisted she won’t recognize them later, which parts will be embellished into even better comedy than they already are. Claude von Riegan proposing marriage. Claude von Riegan proposing a waltz of one candle—three, five. Name an outrageous request that Dorothea won’t accept, if only for the stories it will spawn. She takes his hand.

Claude is not tall—not much taller than she is in her heels. They line up with one another easily, see each other eye to eye.

“Why are we doing this?”

“Because it looks fun,” he says. “And the crowd could use a demonstration, don’t you think?”

“If this fire goes out,” she warns, and jostles their joined hands for emphasis, drawing yet another gasp from the crowd when the flame flickers, “you will look a right fool, and so will I.”

Claude only laughs, that brisk fluttering thing she’s come to know, as he signals the waiting musicians. “If it does, I’ll be the first to point the finger at myself, you have my word. This is hardly the first foolish thing we’ve done, no?”

Theatrics aside, it’s not as foolish as it could be. The waltz, after all, is not a terribly complicated dance—a close hold, six basic steps meant to travel around the room. Maestro Gavino the dance instructor back at the opera had insisted that anyone who could count to three could do a waltz, rapping all the while at her lower back and her protruding elbows with his folding fan. Dorothea, clever girl that she was for already knowing her left foot from her right, could manage counting to three, yes? And she could, so she did. Now, so many years later, she’s dancing waltzes in her sleep.

“And I daresay it won’t be the last.” She meets his gaze straight on, smiling, and they begin.

There’s no slow build to this dance—it starts quick, as though in answer to its own challenge, and only rises. _One-two-three_ and they’re across the floor, and there is Petra, waving hello and goodbye to them both as they pass. _One-two-three_ and they’re circling back the way they came, and over Claude’s shoulder Dorothea spots Bernadetta standing with her arms folded, rising surreptitiously up on her tiptoes to get a better view. She tilts her head back to look up at the chandeliers, still unlit, the high ceiling that had seemed so enormous back in the spring that it could swallow all their little lives whole.

“Tell me, Dorothea, to whom have you promised dances tomorrow?”

 _One-two-three._ When she comes back to earth, Claude is still there, and his steps are still as sure as hers, and his hand still holds hers aloft like it could light up a room, all by itself.

“Do you always talk when you dance?”

“Only when the company’s good. Or I’m hoping to take their mind off something—like my two left feet, or the flames on certain candles.” True to his word, he does not look at the candle, and neither does she. “Anyway, the question stands. Indulge my curiosity a bit, won’t you?”

Dorothea thinks on it a moment, going back in her memory over the last week or so. The truth is she’s asked for a dance just as many times as she’s been asked. It takes its own kind of grace to be able to do both, and in the end she supposes the difference is moot.

“Edelgard. Prince Dimitri. Yuri Leclerc. Professor Manuela. Maybe Linhardt, if I can convince him—I’ve a little bet with Caspar, you see.” The prospect’s enough to make her break out in giggles, as she had when Caspar had first proposed it, clutching her sides as her eyes filled with tears—but she doesn’t break step now, not once. “And yourself? Surely you’ll take a turn about the room with Edie, at least, being fellow house leaders and all.”

Claude shakes his head, releases a long-suffering sigh. “Edelgard wouldn’t agree to dance with me even with spears at her back, fellowship or no fellowship. I do wonder, though, if you might pencil me into your busy schedule. I know you’re in high demand and all, but—favor to a friend, you know.”

An amusing request, coming from Claude, but one she’s heard before. “You want me to save the last dance for you?”

“Gods, no. Too romantic.” He pulls such a face that Dorothea nearly does break step. “The first, perhaps. After me, everyone on that list of yours will dance like a prince out of a storybook in comparison. Even Linhardt.”

This is one she hasn’t heard before, not in any grand ballroom or crowded city square. The first waltz at a ball is not meant to be much of anything, really, just a point of departure for everything that comes after. Everyone wants to be the last in a chain of escalating dances; everyone wants to be impossible to forget.

Everyone but Claude, who seems to have a soft spot for things no one wants. As the music fades and they peel apart, he relinquishes the candle to her. _One-two-three._ The flame gutters once in the settling air, and then steadies, standing tall.

“Consider it done,” Dorothea tells him _._ “The first waltz is yours.”

And he bows low to her in princely fashion, for all the hall to see—hand at his heart, head tilted down to hide a grin that threatens to split his face in two.

*

Around the tail end of the ball, after she’s eaten her fill of saghert and cream twice over and her queue of dances has been exhausted, Dorothea comes back to find Claude at the mostly empty Golden Deer table, and shakes him by the shoulder. “Come with me. Let’s have some real fun.”

Lit from above by a hundred candles, suspended overhead in the iron chandeliers that line the ceiling of the great hall, she’s glowing. Most every friend he’s looked at closely tonight has been, gold light gathering at every edge of them—some blindingly, some more gently, but all with something radiant about them, just from being. He’s wondered, more than once, how he in turn must look.

It’s not so late that the floor is empty; the musicians are still going gamely enough, and there’s a small commotion centered around Ferdinand von Aegir somehow managing to entice Hilda into a candle waltz and burning his hand on the wax in the process. Those who have tired of dancing by now seem content to mill about along the walls with goblets in their hands, speaking in hushed voices, or to steal out into the gardens two by two, where they’re undoubtedly already making googly eyes at each other in the moonlight. Claude himself had been content this past hour to lounge at the table with Lysithea and listen to the spirited debate she’d started with herself about the merits of fondant over buttercream frosting, interpolating occasionally to play devil’s advocate while Raphael snored in the chair on her other side.

Now Lysithea, too, seems to have slipped off into nap-land, head pillowed on her folded arms. Claude pats her head, so lightly it barely even disturbs her hair, and tucks his cape around her shoulders before turning to Dorothea.

“Now you’re speaking my language,” he says. “Lead the way.”

They walk out into the courtyard, where the grass is silvered under the rising moon and the people making the googly eyes have scattered themselves across it—some lying, some sitting, some standing by the gazebo or the garden wall, too distant from each other to eavesdrop on. Fun though it might be to wander gently by and catch whatever gossip they can catch, Dorothea gives them a wide berth. When they step off the stone path and onto the lawn just outside the dining hall, she bends down and steps out of her shoes, picking them up in one hand.

“Are your feet made of steel, Dorothea? A whole evening of dancing, and now here you are out in the winter night, walking around without shoes.”

“Winter at the monastery is nothing,” she tells him, stretching her arms up toward the sky like she means to pull down the moon, boots and all.“Back in the capital, the wind would blow in off the sea, cold enough to take your toes off. Tough luck for you, then, if you didn’t have a good shoe to call your own, let alone a pair of them.”

Claude remembers the sea winds from his time at his grandfather’s house in Derdriu, brief and beautiful though it was. How his nose had run, that first winter, and his fingertips cracked in the chill. Garreg Mach sits inland, protected by the mountain ranges of central Fódlan. Hard to believe that for nearly a year now it’s cradled all of them, sheltering them from the worst of whatever storms pass through.

He wonders, not for the first time, if they’ll even see any snow.

“You’re made of tougher stuff than that, though.”

“By the end, I was made of tougher stuff than that,” Dorothea agrees. “You might try it sometime, going barefoot. It makes you feel alive.”

“Alive, huh? I won’t say no to that.” And just like that he bends down to undo the laces first of his right boot, then his left, and sheds them to walk barefoot two steps behind her across the grass. He carries them loosely, as she does, relics of a different self. “So this is the secret to your invincible happiness.”

“One part of the secret,” she says. They pass the dining hall, go down the stone steps to the dock by the fishing pond, and walk all the way to the end. “Follow me, and I’ll show you the other.”

She sits there, and swings her legs down from the edge until they dangle in the water, immersed to the shins. He hunkers down to join her readily enough, rolling up his pant legs knee-high—and it’s not the cold that gets him, frigid as the pond may be. Instead, it’s—

“Ah—! Gods above, what is that?”

“Oh, relax, Claude, relax!” Dorothea exclaims, taking hold of his arm to steady him before he pitches himself straight into the water, laughing all the blood in her body up into her face. “This isn’t an assassination attempt!”

There are more of them now, down in the dark where his feet disappear. A nibbling at the soles, the same tiny pinching sensation in too many places at once. “You’re awfully calm for someone whose feet are at this moment being eaten by—by—what are they, if you don’t mind, so I can tell Hilda in the morning how I very nearly lost my toes?”

Once he’s rebalanced, she leans forward to regain her breath, hands braced against her knees, head bowed over the water’s surface. When she lifts it again, there might be tears in her eyes. “It’s just the doctor fish, you see—they come and eat the dead skin off your soles, and when you get out your feet look like new, just the lovely fresh skin underneath.”

“You mean to tell me they eat your skin.”

“The circle of life,” Dorothea says, wryly. “Feels nice, right?”

“Your idea of ‘nice’ is the strangest I’ve ever heard,” says Claude, trying to look dubious—and failing, of course. Failing magnificently. “How did you even discover that fish do that?”

“I did a lot of walking and sitting and dangling my feet where they didn’t belong. Surely you’ve made similar mischief in your time.”

Claude folds his arms, sees fit to feign a huff for good measure. “Once or twice.”

“It is nice, though, isn’t it? With time and wear, you shed your skin, and you become a completely new person, with nothing of the old you left.” Dorothea leans back on her hands, tipping her head up to contemplate the sky. The moon’s nearly full now, and bright enough that they don’t even miss the Blue Sea Star. “In five, ten years’ time, who knows who we’ll be? It’ll be all new skin by then, even if it looks the same on the surface.”

Having feasted, the fish have gone as quickly as they arrived, and Claude can’t help swishing his feet through the water a little vengefully now, kicking in circles to send ripples across the pond’s surface. “With such unusual beauty routines, it wouldn’t surprise me to see you hit thirty and not look a day over seventeen.”

“Scoundrel!” She shoves her shoulder into his upper arm, but she’s grinning fit to put the moon to shame—and gradually that shoulder comes to lean more gently against Claude’s own, and settles there without moving. “Can you imagine being thirty? What if I were to meet you again, say, in Enbarr, and you were looking for a guide who knew her way around all the fun parts? Maybe you’d know to pay a call to your old friend, but I doubt you’d remember we ever talked about this.”

Claude doesn’t need to tell Dorothea he can hardly imagine being thirty. It sounds like something out of legend, or the history of the distant past. He certainly doesn’t need to tell her that there was a time not too long ago that he could barely imagine being eighteen, a time not much further back from that that he hesitated to imagine tomorrow, every day balanced on the edge of a knife. She must already know that. They’ve both already lived that—and, wonder of wonders, of all the places in this wide world, it brought them here. For now. That’s something.

Instead, he says, “Oh, I’d remember, all right. I’ll remember this for the rest of my life.”

“You will, will you?” she asks him, airily, like she doesn’t believe him. Or like she just might. “What will you bet on it?”

And Claude lifts his head and points up with one unhesitating arm toward the Belt of Indech—to the three little birds nesting side by side in the western sky, in an overgrown forest of stars without names. Still the easiest ones to find.

“Those stars of yours,” he says.

**Author's Note:**

> OH BOY, NOTES!
> 
> [1] Dorothea's liturgical song in the beginning is a tweaked version of [the sequence recited during the Solemnity of Corpus Christi](https://www.holyinfancychurch.com/father-andy-corner/the-solemnity-of-corpus-christi/), because what are the artifacts of your Catholic upbringing for if not to be repurposed for fun.
> 
> [2] The candle waltz in the penultimate scene is an obvious homage to [the dance scene from _Crimson Peak_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGy7KxL7nfQ). Which I have seen nothing of, yet, besides the dance scene, in spite of having had the question "which of your two faves would waltz the other while holding a candle" on loop in my brain at all waking hours for months. One day I will actually watch _Crimson Peak_ to remedy this, I promise.
> 
> [3] I'm on [Twitter!](https://twitter.com/strikingIight)
> 
> Thank you for reading! I wish you joy and many opportunities for the most indulgent self-indulgence.


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